5 Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes, and affiliate marketers are not an exception. But there are several common things you can learn to avoid today instead of making them over and over again. Let’s look into them together!
1. Picking the wrong product/niche to promote
There are millions of products of all types you can promote with affiliate marketing campaigns and, but this variety might also cause you lots of pain, since you should choose these products wisely. When an affiliate product and niche are just right for you, it fuels you up and inspires you to create more marketing activities around it. You might even get hooked and end up bring more authentic in what you do.
One affiliate marketing mistake you should avoid is picking a product/niche just because you think there’s money in it. If the topic itself doesn’t drive you on its own, it’s not worth it. Believe it or not, you likely won’t be natural at promoting an affiliate business niche that doesn’t excite you.
2. Picking Too Many Products to Promote
When choosing affiliate products, you may be tempted to select too many of them. It’s a common mistake for most newbies. But then, you’ll be less enthusiastic when you get distracted because you have too many things on your mind and you can’t even figure out what to do with them. So here is the advice: pick a single product or a handful of excellent products and make sure to focus all your enthusiasm on them, and remember, you can always expand product by product and grow your business over time. Make sure that you give each campaign the individual attention it needs to succeed.
3. Lack of High-Quality Regular Content
We can’t underestimate the importance of this point: content is your everything. Content is crucial for successful marketing. No matter what your site is about – product reviews, comparisons, different use cases – each piece of content contributes to your online sales directly or indirectly. A common mistake affiliates make is publishing content that’s not insightful or actionable. Therefore, anytime you want to write a piece of content, make sure there is a purpose and solution. Put yourself in the shoes of your potential buyers and imagine what they would be interested in. After all, you want to get people hooked with a great story and cool facts, right? Then make sure to post content regularly – even once a week is a good frequency.
4. Poor Quality Website
A low-quality website is always a bad idea. Why? Low standards will quickly translate into a low sales volume, so make this one a priority and approach the project professionally. No, no, you don’t need to be a professional web-designer to make it look good. But you don’t have to, since there are lots of platforms, such as wordpress.org, that let you create your site for free. Remember, bad user experiences – such as slow page speed, too many ads, or a messy template will discourage visitors from your website and often frighten them away from your website, and that’s it. It is quite unlikely the users will come back, even when you improve the website later on.
5. Not stepping out of your comfort zone
When working as an affiliate marketer, you need to constantly keep absorbing new trends and techniques and try always be ahead of the curve. It’s the online world, changes are happening rapidly, so don’t be afraid to learn and apply your knowledges simultaneously.
You should always be well informed about online trends, ranking factors and any online news that might affect your online presence and SEO ranking. Educate, read online guides and make sure you know what’s going on. When launching new and different campaigns like ads on social media, Adwords, or email campaigns, it’s important to test different techniques, cause delivering the same message won’t teach you anything new. Try different things, especially in the form of A/B tests, because experiments are always rewarding in a long-term perspective. For example, test both plain and HTML emails; find new approaches to your audience/users, try to understand what they want and how their interests and needs may change with time; or segment your user base and be sure to create a personalized message for each group of users.
Try to avoid these mistakes and grow your affiliate business wisely!